Gripping Grief / With a nod to du Maurier, Stephen King haunts a house and a wealthy widower

REVIEWED BY Yunah Kim, Elizabeth Judd, Special to The Chronicle

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 20, 1998

BAG OF BONES

By Stephen King

Scribner; 529 pages; $28

Is Stephen King, the Big Mac and fries of the literary world, overreaching in his homage to Daphne du Maurier's classic "Rebecca"?

With "Bag of Bones," King reins in the gore and spins a pretty good yarn about a house named Sara Laughs that's overrun with restless spirits. But, looking up at the early dawn after a night of page-turning, one realizes that Sara Laughs doesn't haunt like "Rebecca's" Manderley. The ugly small- town secret at the heart of King's latest novel appeals primarily to the reader's baser instincts for rubbernecking -- hardly the denouement set up with jewel-like precision by du Maurier.

Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, novelist Mike Noonan returns to his summer getaway in (what else?) a small Maine town on a lake ominously and obviously named Dark Score. Mike is quickly drawn into a custody battle, bankrolling a young widow named Mattie Devore who wants to keep her daughter away from her father-in-law, Max. Max Devore is an aging software millionaire who's been bad since birth; he's cultivated his own Pottersville on the banks of Dark Score by bossing around a gang of hapless geezers.

Mike takes on the whole town in a bid to be Mattie's provider, hero and lover. In one of the novel's more tiresome passages, Mike rhapsodizes over his attraction for a dancing Mattie (gyrating atop a Frisbee to Don Henley's "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"). Mike acknowledges the ickiness of a 40-year-old man pursuing a girl half his age, but page upon page of soft-core ogling belies his shame.

"Bag of Bones" is full of red herrings, from Mike's wife's dead-end sleuthing to the hash King makes of du Maurier's novel. In "Rebecca," it's satisfying to watch the unnamed narrator draw strength and power from the obstacles Mrs. Danvers throws in her way. Mike Noonan, on the other hand, looms large from the first, rich in bucks and appetite. His experiences don't change him all that deeply.

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Somehow, King's vision of terror has narrowed to the anxieties of a millionaire celebrity writer. (King's haul last year was $84 million.) Mike describes his place in the world this way: "We weren't rich enough to own a jet (Grisham) or a pro football team (Clancy), but by the standards of Derry, Maine, we were quite rolling in it."

King's long journey since "Carrie," his first novel published in 1973, is clear in his upscale preoccupations -- Massachusetts is always "Taxachusetts" -- and gleeful allusions to his now- huge body of work. At the same time, he seems to have grown tired of his own subversive brand of gross-out product placement.

His prose is no longer chock-full of everyday products overlaid with horror; there are no images here like "Carrie's" bloated rat stuck in an Orange Crush bottle. The main con sumer tie-in is a tame one: the repeated mention of Kmart, Mattie's shop of choice. Most annoyingly, King has apparently acquired a savage disdain for mobile-home residents (no matter that King was once sleeping in a trailer himself).

What hasn't changed is King's gift for writing about grief. In "Bag of Bones," Mike fixates on the bookmark in the paperback that his late wife will never finish. Going through her purse, he finds a chocolate mouse and eats it, weeping. These moments, mundane and telling, place the reader squarely in these characters' lives.

King is an unacknowledged master of showing how the bereaved learn to ignore all that's suspect and scary about their feelings: ". . . we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things -- fish and unicorns and men on horseback -- but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on."

When King isn't describing grief, he's turning his pen to writer's block -- that bogeyman of far too few successful authors. "The Shining" was about a man driven to murder by the blankness of the sheet of paper in his typewriter ("All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.") The writer in "The Dark Half" waged a very violent battle against his creative self made human. And in "Bag of Bones," Mike's inability to write -- "the bookberry tree had died" -- is vanquished only after an orgiastic dream involving every female character in the book.

King once said that he'd chosen horror because imagining the worst is a way of making sure the worst never happens. So far, writing about writer's block has worked like a charm. Never at a loss for words, King seems to have found a new niche, revisiting literary classics and waxing eloquent about his own rising fortunes. "Bag of Bones" is hardly his best book, but it's lively and, given its flaws, far more gripping than it has any right to be.